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Actually considering Dragon Wars working title was actually "The Bard's Tale IV"... I can kinda see that. Good game, honestly liked it. But Alpha Protocol... hmmm. For some reason I just never played it... but my cousin played it a lot recently. I guess I should fire it up if anything.

Also Thirith... I hope you're aware that all opinions are pretty much useless for everything other than getting a little insight into how a person thinks & feels.

I don't want to derail the conversation even more, so I'll keep it short, but to my mind there's a huge range of opinions, from the unfounded to the well argued. Opinions can be more or less coherent, more or less considered. Personally I like discussions best when they go beyond "I feel that X", "Well, *I* feel that Y".

Considering the thread title... I think it's a little too late to be worrying about derailing anything. Also, don't use that mad emoji as it's confusing as all hell. That is unless you were actually serious then... ummm... never mind? Continue on... nothing to see here.

I find it funny (but not unexpected?) That I posted in this thread after 4 months of it being dormant to talk about how I got to take a look behind the scenes, and the thread just bulldozed over it to continue arguing about the same argument that stopped 4 months ago.
At least a few of you are entertaining when you go about it.

I've often wondered why there are so few RPG games set in space or futuristic settings, which is a shame as I'd love to see more games of this type. Bioware seem to be leading the charge in this space (pun not intended) with ME and KOTOR, and very little competition.

So, I played some 12 hours of this over the weekend and I'm kind of hooked. The series lost me with Mass Effect 2, but Andromeda starts over from a clean slate and it's not like I'm exactly spoiled for choice when it comes to games in the the genre (space opera), so I thought I'd give it another chance. From what I had heard initially, I expected a complete mess, but it's not really that bad. Certainly nothing on Bethesda/Obsidian level of brokenness. Some animations look funny, but that's about it*

I'd say that the game is in many regards an improvement of the first game in particular. The combat is still cover-based shooting, but it's better than either of the first two games and the dialogue choices are pretty much the same old simple wheel without the pointless saint/jerk dichotomy. The MAKO is back, but it handles much better and there's much more to explore. Once again there's an annoying planet scanning mini-game designed to waste your time, but there's much less of it.

What got me hooked, though, was the intrigue of exploring another galaxy, meeting alien races and getting involved in space politics. The game is a mediocre shooter, barely an RPG and lacking in a lot of other regards, but the fantasy of exploring a new frontier kind of works for me.

* here's a video with some pretty good speculation about what could have gone wrong with the animations. As someone who knows very little about animation in games, I found it very enlightening:

Certainly nothing on Bethesda/Obsidian level of brokenness. Some animations look funny, but that's about it*

I'd not be too quick to say that. With Andromeda they copied Fallout 4's limited conversation wheel (of usually only 2-3 choices), with conversation choices that:

* Don't really convey what your character will say if you select that option
* Often have conversation choices which all = the same thing

Not much roleplaying in that really. Much more linear than how it was handled to far better effect even in Mass Effect 3.

Mass Effect, much like the Witcher are about choices which have knock on effects later on. Some good, some bad. Take that away and you lose a part of the roleplaying experience of choice and consequence.

I haven't played Mass Effect 3, but the first two games were never much of an RPG to begin with. You basically exhausted all the exposition lines and then made a saint/asshole decision on how to respond, with basically the same end result. And the few real decisions were pretty binary and didn't really matter all that much in the end. I remember I was especially pissed about the Rachni queen decision amounting to nothing, one more reason I'm glad I didn't play the third game.

Don't get me wrong, the dialogue is certainly limited, but, from what I've seen, it's not more limited than the first game. You still make decisions about things, like whether the first outpost in the galaxy will be military or scientific and whether a criminal will be exiled or not and probably something will come of it in the end, if you're lucky.

And I completely disagree with all of that. You do quests, you level up and spend points. That's already an RPG. You talk with people and via the ways you choose to talk with them develop friendships / relationships, and you make decisions on how to deal with things which yield events and outcomes later on. That's completely an RPG. I would argue that the first game is more of an RPG than the 2nd or 3rd games, but they are still RPGs. If your not aware that they are indeed RPGs then I'd suggest you do some reading.

And the Rachni decision does have resulting effects. Have a play of the game and then you shall see.

The only thing Andromeda has going for it, is that it's open world. Beyond that, it doesn't hold a candle to the other games in the series.

The more I'm into DA:I, the more I'm not surprised about how ME:A ended up. It's basically the same approach, with the bar lowered a bit here and there. The thing is, where were all the critics, journalists and fans, when it was time to call DA:I on its bullshit? Oh yeah, they were busy giving out 8 or 9 out of 10s and GOTYs. One interesting exception:

The thing is, where were all the critics, journalists and fans, when it was time to call DA:I on its bullshit?

Enjoying them for being mindless open-world icon hunts? I mean, and I genuinely try not to project my own tastes as an expectation towards other people, have you seen the goddamn games people play? Open-world...CHECK. Non-creative crafting...CHECK. Juvenile love fantasy...CHECK.

Sometimes I almost think I hate videogames because so many of them exist for the sole purpose of consuming time.

I know, the ubiworld template seems to exist solely to take time and give players tedious jobs, with small pieces of actual meaningful content spread so wide and thin. And a lot of people seem to love it. I tend to avoid those games, because, well, when I come home from work, I'm genuinely interested in doing something other than work. Maybe that type of games works better when you're in high-school or college?

What I found weird about DA:I though, is that it found a way to be sort of addictive in its boredom, even for me. E.g. I'm not a completionist, but I like exploration, and that game forced me to be completionist of a sort. Like, some mysterious locations have multiple doors that require ridiculous amount of magic shards to unlock. But, first you have to find magic skull telescopes to even see the shards on the map, and of course they're scattered all over the place, often in ridiculous hard-to-reach spots, etc. You see where it goes. "Want to be an explorer? Ok, now be a good Chinese gold farmer and get down to work." It's like Dungeon Master or EoB all over again, but this time there are 9 or 12 doors in a row, and you need like a 100 keys to unlock them. And they're scattered around the whole world.

In hindsight Andromeda is a logical post-DAI development, but somehow I really quite enjoyed DAI whereas Andromeda just feels pointless. Maybe DAI just managed to fool me but I felt like my actions actually changed something in that game, whereas there's been several points in Andromeda where it seems like I'm making a choice and I've googled to make sure there won't be any terrible repercussions later on (yeah, it's cheap, but I don't want to find out half my crew is going to die ten hours later because I flipped the coin wrong) and in every single case the only outcome of your "choice" is that your character says their line a bit differently. I kinda viewed the original trilogy as a choice simulator so that feels really disappointing, but I guess a lot of the outcomes only played out in subsequent games there too so there's always Andromeda 2 (or is there?). I'm not that far into the main story so maybe your choices start mattering at some point, but I very much doubt it, seems to go against the whole design philosophy.

Well, it is clear that the Witcher 3 team has worked very hard to make their system work while clearly something has gone wrong with Andromeda's pipeline. We are unlikely to know what exactly happened without an inside source in Bioware Montreal. I think he laid out some pretty good guesses, though.

We're unlikely to know for certain, but there has been reasonable speculation, that likely has already been mentioned, that the core creative members behind Mass Effect have either left Bioware or left the ME team for other projects, leaving development to people who maybe aren't as good or lack the authority/desire to resist publisher pressure.

It's too easy and a little ignorant to call it incompetence, my suspicion would be something hierarchical, like a lack of communication between team leads and designers. Like the game was designed by a committee of fans who wanted to cram in their personal favourite things about Mass Effect series onto the model they were instructed to use from DA:I, couple that with weak QA and you get ME:A.

PR will do what it always does and try to paint a rosey picture. "the game is great, there are no problems here, if you don't like the character designs you're probably a trump supporter"